Pride flag history: 48 years of the rainbow

This week, the Pride flag turned 48.

It first flew on 25 June 1978, over the San Francisco Gay Freedom Day Parade. Most people picture six clean stripes and assume it arrived fully formed, like a logo. It didn’t. The real story is hand-stitched, slightly chaotic, and a lot more human than the tidy version.

It was made by many hands

The flag is usually credited to one man, Gilbert Baker, an artist and drag performer who was asked by Harvey Milk and others to make a symbol the community could rally behind. Baker designed it — but he didn’t make it alone. Volunteers dyed the fabric in bins and stitched it together by hand, among them Lynn Segerblom, who went by Faerie Argyle Rainbow and mixed many of the original colours, and James McNamara. Their names get left out of most tellings. On a flag about being seen, that’s worth correcting.

The first version had eight stripes, and each one meant something:

• Hot pink for sex
• Red for life
• Orange for healing
• Yellow for sunlight
• Green for nature
• Turquoise for art and magic
• Indigo for serenity
• Violet for spirit

Then it changed, because real things do

Within a year, the flag we know had already shifted. Hot pink was dropped because the fabric was hard to get hold of. Turquoise and indigo were folded into a single blue. What was left was the six-stripe rainbow now seen on shopfronts and lanyards every June.

That change wasn’t a betrayal of the design. It was the flag doing what it has always done: adapting so more people could carry it. Demand exploded after Harvey Milk was assassinated in November 1978, and a grieving community reached for something to hold. The flag met them there.

It has kept evolving since — most visibly into the Progress flag, which adds the black and brown stripes and the trans colours to say plainly that Black, brown and trans people belong at the centre, not the edges.

Why this matters now

The flag was never perfect, never finished, and never the work of one person. It was improvised, collaborative, and willing to change shape to include more of us. That’s not a flaw in the symbol. That’s the whole point of it.

So the next time you see it — on a march, a window, a profile picture — remember it was sewn by many hands, named by people who are often forgotten, and redrawn again and again to make more room. A flag worth following is one that keeps making room.

Happy 48th. Here’s to the hands that made it, and the ones still stitching.

Read more at the Gilbert Baker Foundation.

— Capital Pride value: Honouring Our Roots.